Kayaking Zoar Gap in Charlemont, MA with the Columbia University Kayaking Club.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Teddy Roosevelt via Jamie Dimon’s 2008 letter to shareholders.
Six Keys to Successful Change & Freedom
From my coach with Tony Robbins organization:
1) Be an observer of yourself - you pay attention to both an internal and external observer.
internal observer: in your head, how you talk to yourself, whats going on in your body
external observer: noticing whats around you, your work area, flow to your work vs. start/stop,
when you observe yourself you find things you want to change. If you don’t observer yourself, you just live out the pattern
when you do observe yourself, there’s a couple of things that can happen: you can beat yourself up, or you can realize that you have the power to change
2) Be curious and not judgmental - what’s the gift in this? what can I create out of this? what can I learn from this?
3) Be grateful - have a spreadsheet where you write down everyday 5 (new) things to be grateful - either in the morning or in the evening. write in the evening and review in the morning. Also write down how it impacts your life.
Its easy to be grateful on days when you’re feeling good. But on days when you’re not feeling good, it’s even more important. So if you can’t think of any, go back to another day and re copy those!!
4) Be intentional - at the beginning of your day, choose how you want your day to go. You can do this throughout the day too. If you’re going into a meeting, stop and ask what kind of results you want to get, how you want to show up, etc.
If you’re intentional you choose something specific. Choose one thing everyday that you want to complete. That way, even if you don’t get all the other thigns done, you get at least the one thing completed so you can feel successful.
Choose something to do everyday.
Choose how you want to feel for that day.
Everyday write down four different feelings that you want to experience
I want to feel joy, focused, productive, funny, enthusiastic, happiness, etc.
5) Take meaningful action - even if its baby-steps.
6) Celebrate - feel good inside your body; very physical / visceral sort of experience. Often we get so focused on our goals that the only time we can feel good is when we actually accomplish our goals. You end up having to wait to long between the goals. So life becomes drudgery.
Celebration means you find a physical way to feel good about the process. Smiling. Dancing. Running. Breaking out your list of ways to feel good.
An afternoon at the gun club.
I took a few hours off work today to visit the Scottsdale Gun Club with my friend S and her father, J. J is a full blooded Apache, which is interesting because I happen to know that Apaches used to torture white eyes like myself by hanging them upside down from a tree, then starting a small fire under the victim’s head. This fire would take several hours to heat up the body to a temperature required to kill said victim. I’m not sure how he feels about my friendship with his daughter, but I’m hoping for a better treatment.
There are basically 3 types of people at your typical gun club:
1) Relatively normal, everyday people who just want to fire off a few rounds at the shooting range.
2) Gun loving country folks, also known as rednecks. Most of these individuals are proud to call themselves rednecks, so I don’t think I’m throwing out any uncalled for insults here. These guys fire off machine guns, riffles, and all types of other guns. Generally with unbelievable accuracy.
3) Complete and utter weirdos, the likes of which you never, under any circumstances, want to see carrying a gun. A skinny but freakishly oblong 6’5 man with pasty skin and a glock tucked into his booty shorts on walked by us when we were in line, prompting H to laugh, J to comment that he was a bit unhappy to see such a person with a gun, and me to picture this guy realizing we were laughing at him and open fire on us.
Anyway, it was a great afternoon; we shot an assortment of revolvers and pistols and everyone went home happy and exhausted. If you haven’t been to a shooting range, check one out some time if for no other reason than to know what it’s like to fire a weapon. You can rent just about any type of gun (including machine guns), buy bullets, and get a brief lesson for $40-$80. Scottsdale Gun Club gets two thumbs up in my book.
Few things in life are more attractive (or dangerous) than a woman who knows how to handle a Glock.
J fired off his shots in a clocklike manner, so consistent with the intervals between shots that I was able to take this picture exactly as the bullet was exploding.
Greetings from Scottsdale
I’d like to thank Ryan for offering me this wonderful opportunity to co-author his blog. I hope to make insightful, entertaining, or educational posts written in grammatically correct English. I’ll try not to embarrass Ryan, my parents, or Columbia Business School, but I can’t make any promises. Still, that rules out most of the options for what I like to write about, so the majority of my contributions may be photographs of landscaping around Scottsdale and the rest of Arizona.
“If I’d written the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of journalism.” — Hunter S. Thompson
Mahalo.
Book Review: Eat Pray Love
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth GilbertMy review
Eat, Pray, LoveMy ex-girlfriend tried to get me to read this book for the longest time while we were together. Even though I knew it was her favorite book, I refused to read it, probably because of the word “Pray” in the title. As an atheist, I figured I wouldn’t be able to relate to anything in there.
Turns out I was wrong. This is a beautiful work about one person’s struggle with post-marital depression, and how she managed to pull herself out of it through a year of travel to Italy, India, and Indonesia.
Elizabeth Gilbert shows three distinct strategies that she employed to successfully move beyond the pains of depression and into a balanced, joyful life of love.
First, in Italy, she indulges in massive amounts of pleasure, eating every delicious item she can find and putting on like 30 pounds in the process. She makes some wonderful friends, learns to speak Italian, and finds herself feeling “not depressed” for the first time in years.
After 4 months in Italy, she moves to India where she lives on an “ashram,” which is something like a spiritual compound lead by a famous guru. There she devotes herself wholeheartedly to meditation, spending like 10 hours per day in various rituals. During most of these sessions, she struggles with to control her thoughts. But she also comes within a whisker of experiencing some form of enlightenment, however frustratingly indescribable that must remain.
Finally, she heads to the island of Bali, in Indonesia to take up residence with a medicine man who had invited her to stay with him on a previous visit. He doesn’t remember her, which throws things off a bit, but she persists and ends up learning valuable lessons about balance from her and other friends she meets on the island. More importantly, she falls in love with an older Brazilian man who finally gives her what she’d been missing all those years in her failed relationship.
The plot above, however, is decidedly not the point of reading this book. That comes from Gilbert’s insights into the nature of suffering and happiness, and our ability to achieve the latter through a journey of self-exploration and love.
Indeed, the most important part of this book is that ultimately it us up to you to make the changes required to move beyond negative emotions. Those emotions are nothing more than action signals telling you something that is wrong, either with the conditions of your life, or your mental map of how life is supposed to be. It’s up to you to make a change to one or the other.
As they say in whitewater kayaking, “you must participate in your own rescue.” So start swimming!
View all my reviews.
Seeking happiness outside ourselves is like looking for sunshine in a cave facing north - Tibetan saying via “Happiness” by Mathieu Richard
$LULU will make a killing entering online retail in ‘09: They get social media, twitter account for each store & have 1 mm customer e-mails
